John Burnham (Editor). After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. 274 pp., illus., apps., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. $35 (cloth).

The return of the political Freud? Some notes on the new historiography of psychoanalysis

“…The 1950s was the formative period, when Freud was portrayed as a man of Enlightenment, the ‘godless Jew’ – the main historical narrative for many decades. This line of thought became even stronger in the 1970s and 1980s, with works that located Freud as an archetype of the secular ‘Jewish renaissance’ in fin de siècle Vienna (Gay, 1987, 1988; Rieff, 1959; Schorske, 1973; see also, Ross, 2012). But this perception of Freud was challenged by historians who insisted on writing an ‘against-the-grain’ history of psychoanalysis, looking not only for what Freud said about himself but also for his ‘blind spots’.…”